Job Account

A job account structures construction receivables the way the underlying legal rights actually work: by project. A contractor customer may buy for a dozen jobs simultaneously, but lien rights, bond rights, preliminary notice deadlines, joint-check agreements, and often the practical source of payment are all job-specific. Selling to that customer on one undifferentiated account makes it impossible to know which invoices are secured by which project — and when trouble comes, that mapping is exactly what determines recovery.

A functioning job-account practice ties every order and invoice to a job identifier carrying the project's metadata: site address, owner, general contractor, bonding status, notice dates sent, and last-furnishing date. This enables job-level credit decisions layered on the customer-level limit — a supplier might extend a marginal contractor generous credit on a bonded public job (surety protection) while requiring cash on its unbonded private remodel work. It also keeps cash application honest: payments funded by a particular project should retire that project's invoices, because misapplied cash can compromise lien claims and confuse waiver reconciliation.

Job accounts also sharpen collections. Aging by job reveals which project is the problem — a customer 60 days slow on one job and current on five others has a project dispute or a slow-paying owner, not a solvency crisis, and the remedy (notice of intent on that job, joint checks from that GC) is surgical rather than relationship-wide. The discipline costs order-entry effort; it repays itself the first time a customer fails owing money across multiple jobs with different security positions.